In not-awful-youtubers news, I recently found out about Captain Disillusion. It’s kind of a surreal Snopes. He explains visual effects used in popular videos in way more depth than you realized you wanted to know.

As far as I can tell, it’s one dude for the most part. The production values are off the charts.

This one from last year is the first I watched. The regular commentary is interlaced with asides referencing other youtubers complaining about “the youtube algorithm”. He ends with “Maybe if I just keep making stuff, to the best of my ability, at a pace I’m comfortable with, my audience will seek me out”.

And his sign-off phrase!Love with your heart, use your head for everything else.

I actually saw some of Beakman’s World as a kid before Bill Nye, but only a few episodes. Then BILL BILL BILL BILL and I must have melded the two in my mind until I saw him again on Captain Disillusion.

Something that has spooked around my head recently: Is Bucky O’Hare just a forgotten property now? It would be a perfect time to revive it considering it’s a cartoon in which the heroes are fighting fascist frogs.

As unfortunate as it is and how it reflects on my primary hobby, I think this needs to be talked about here.

Christine Sprankle is a very popular cosplayer in the Magic the Gathering community. She is popular enough to have been subject of a mini-documentary sponsored by Wizards of the Coast (who make MtG, in case you didn’t know). Last friday she announced that she would be leaving the community citing extensive harassment, particularly naming Magic YouTuber Jeremy Hambly as the prime instigator of such.

Hambly runs a YouTube channel called Unsleeved Media (previously known as MTGHeadquarters) which was a couple of years ago the biggest YT channel for Magic the Gathering, mostly on the back of easy-to-make box opening videos and little to no actually informative or meaningful content. He has since been overtaken in popularity by other channels with better content. At the same time he was told “not cool” when making an inappropriate joke about women, and blames such events for not having been invited to the Magic Community Cup (a yearly event where popular members of the community battle the employees of WotC) and no longer receiving preview cards for new sets. He pretty quickly went down the rabbit hole of becoming a full blown alt-right troglodyte, the type that uses “beta cuck loser” on a regular basis.

Hambly has started using his channel to also stir all sorts of drama with misleading thumbnail images and complete misrepresentations. The official story is of course “it’s all a joke, bro” but the implication for his followers is of course to shun the people he features in such videos, which of course leads to substantial harassment for those victims. I am not going to directly link to this vile behavior, but instead going to feature a video which has been made by another much better MtG YouTuber who refers to himself just as “The Professor” on his channel Tolarian Community College, who has himself been a target of Hambly on multiple occasions.

In the wake of all of this a lot of talk has started about what the community at large and WotC in particular can do in these situations. WotC released a statement on the weekend and says it is looking into the situation. However since MTGHQ is not actively participating in tournaments there is not much they can do. A large selection of Magic Pro Players have also released an open letter condemning such behavior with a call to do better and step in when people see it happen (The letter has been published on several websites simultaneously).

At the same time a bunch of fans of Hambly have come out with the typical assortment of counter-measures such as accusing others of forming a hate mob against him and the charge that nobody is presenting Hambly’s position fairly. The largest subreddit for MtG has also had to clean up a ton of vile spewed by Hambly’s followers to the point where most threads that deal with the issue are almost immediately locked as it has also been targeted by raids from the usual suspects.

Edit: Update from WotC which was released a couple hours after I made that post.

WotC has shunned the evil person from their community, which is good. But there is the question of what else can they do about it? The person isn’t going to tournaments, so banning them does nothing. What they need to do is work to get this person banned from other places. Start with getting the person’s YouTube channel shut down and work from there.

Update: Another prominent person banned is Travis Woo, who earned himself a 1 year suspension. Woo formerly wrote for Channel Fireball, one of the biggest secondary retailers and sponsor of one of the bigger pro teams. He is also a popular deck brewer. However, he was recently caught creating a facebook group in which he basically tried to create a Magic 4-chan equivalent. That facebook group had, among other things, “drafting” of female community members, as in pictures of a number of prominent female community members were posted and then people were asked “who’d you take first?”. Woo’s excuse was basically “I just started it, but even though I was the admin I didn’t pay attention to what was happening there and didn’t take part in it.” Also before that Woo had a stream in which he pseudo-intellectually relitigated Mein Kampf as in “You know, Nazis were horrible, racist genocidal maniacs, but they had some good ideas too…”

I guess I put my pseudo-intellectual musings as a non-native english speaker here since it talks about a rather offensive term:

Considering that when assholes who use “faggot” to insult people, i.e. the people discussed in this thread, often resort to the cheap excuse of “it just means ‘a bundle of sticks’” when they are challenged, doesn’t that make all fascists “faggots”?

It was not an argument I planned on making to anyone. I just found it kind of strange as a non-native english speaker that assholes try to excuse their use of the highly offensive term “faggot” by quoting a secondary defintion of “a bundle of sticks” (even though they obviously meant it in the current primary definition of “degenerate homosexual”), when in fact the symbol of the philosophy most of these assholes subscribe to is a literal bundle of sticks.

Well, the issue is, they don’t actually care. It’s literally just because they think they’re thumbing their nose at the “SJWs” because they’ve found an “Out” that everyone knows is bullshit. Everyone knows what they mean, they know everyone knows, and they’re just using that excuse because they think it will anger people even more, because they’re “Getting away with it.”

The other part is that, well, Fascism doesn’t mean a bundle of rods, or sticks. The Italian root word does, and the latin root of that means something similar. Etymologically interesting, but ultimately not that relevant. Faggot, on the other hand, still means that - but has fallen out of use almost entirely except by shitty people, due to it’s usage as a slur against gay people.

Another thing about the whole curfuffle with Hambly: Breitbart attempted to get in on the action and start “Magicgate”. It bellyflopped horribly. Here’s an annotated version of the article they attempted to start it off with, since I refuse to link to the original.

Apparently one of their arguments is something along the lines of Magic having a monopoly, which is kind of bizarre considering the trillion (rough guess) of other collectible card games out there, e.g. Pokemon and Yu Gi Oh. They are also using the phrase “monopoly provider”, which is all sorts of odd unless they mean the parent company Hasbro, but then Monopoly should be capitalized.